Top Articles

Witco – Tiki and 60’s cool!

The first time I heard about Witco was on a discussion on a Mid-Century Facebook group about Tiki art, the name that kept coming up was Witco, with a link to this post on a Tiki Fan board: My name is Burke Hovde (aka…The Witco Kid on www.tikicentral.com). I’m the son of Ron Hovde, one of the Witco Co-Founders and Artists with Bill Westenhaver. I grew up with Witco everywhere. Witco wallhangings and furniture are all over my parents house and our family’s cabin. Witco started out as Western International Trading Company and imported South Pacific home furnishing items like Capishell Lamps. They also were into carvings that eventually evolved into the rough cedar chain saw carved furniture and Tikis that most people know Witco

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Ohio House Motel Chicago – a survivor

Distinguished by its fabulous diamond shaped exterior, the Ohio House is a fabulous example of mid-century architecture right in the middle of downtown Chicago. Other architectural points of interest include the matching suspended sign, held up by a geometric metal grid which is itself reflected in the pattern block fence that runs along Ohio Street. Rough-faced stone walls and a large stainless steel sign on the east facade add to it’s distinctly Chicago Mid-Century design. The architect for the motel was Arthur Salk of Shayman and Salk, who also designed the Summit Motel on Lincoln and the LaSalle Motor Lodge at LaSalle & Superior (now a Howard Johnson); the firm’s stamp was also on many apartment buildings in the inner suburbs. According to the webite,

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The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Nostalgia is often described as a wistful desire to return to a former time, an era when things were simpler, better, less stressful, more fun (insert your descriptor here). The truth, however, is that regardless of the period of time you live in or where you live it is the best of times and the worst of times. Nostalgia is a great deal like vintage pictures, it is one dimensional, a moment in time taken out of context. The cover photo, provided courtesy of the Mohave Museum of History & Arts, illustrates this point. The Route 66 sign on the post provides a point of reference but what else can be discerned from the photo? From the perspective of nostalgia these appear to be simpler times.

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Some Ideas for Midcentury Style Fencing

MidCentury Style welcomes Ted Cleary, ASLA, of Studio Cleary Landscape Architecture as Contributing Writer with this first in a series of periodic articles on midcentury modern garden design: When it comes to creating a period landscape for your midcentury modern home, it’s all about the garden geometry and the hardscaping.  Plants are plants; they don’t care whether they’re part of a “French Chateau” garden design or an “MCM” garden design. (Although some plant species — and certainly, the fashion in which they’re laid out — may seem more suitable for particular styles……considerations which we’ll talk about in later blog posts).  But it’s in the shapes of constructed elements of wood, concrete, masonry, metal, that a design vocabulary asserts itself. One such component, all the more visible because of

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Interior Design

Updates! Check out this bathroom

If you remember this post, you’ll remember that my reader was trying to give away some wonderful bathroom fixtures – they just hated to see them go in the dump! (I totally relate). Well, here’s a happy ending, they didn’t get rid of them, but couldn’t let them go and so incorporated them into the remodel! Yay! Isn’t that a wonderful use of color? I love the yellow behind and the black accents! So, for all of you who aren’t quite sure how to “update” colored bathroom fixtures, here’s a great example! No update yet on my upcoming interview – hopefully in the next few days! I’ll keep you all posted!

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My mother's spice rack

Over at RetroRenovation, my Mother’s spice rack showed up: Pam calls this Kromex (brand) “pink aluminum”. Very cool! I spent the day surfing around and finding neat blogs, etc. I signed up for Technorati Profile, and added the code in my sidebar, so grab that if it’s easy for you. It’s amazing how lost you can get in the internet these days. What are you favorite 50’s design or houseblogs?

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Preservation

Updating and renovating? Purist?

I was thinking about renovating this morning – mainly because we’re at a lull on projects until we have some money drop in our lap! 🙂 But I was looking at some real estate ads in Palm Springs (pretty much the mid-century capital) and one mentioned that the kitchen had been “ruined” in an update. There weren’t any pictures, but it got me to thinking about a house we have down the street who ripped out a fabulous concrete block wall to put in a prefab tall “picket” fence. It doesn’t go with the house and I hate it. So, how do we educate people? That there’s a way to “renovate” without ruining and to look for the elements that truly make it a 50’s

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Mies van der Rohe’s gas station in Montreal preservation success!

It’s wonderful when we can report a Mid-Century preservation success: “Long, low and in his trademark black steel, the shuttered-since-2008 Esso station by Bauhaus master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, at boulevard de l’Île des Soeurs and rue Berlioz in Montreal’s Nuns’ Island community, currently lies stripped of a little of its beauty – huge sheets of glass and their associated mullions have been numbered and disassembled for restoration – but by autumn, the building will be buzzing with youth and seniors as a maison des générations.” Read the rest of the article here…. And another article here: Montreal Open File

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100 Things to Do On Route 66 Before You Die

Recently a publisher, on recommendation of Jim Ross, approached me with an intriguing proposal – write a book about Route 66 that is in essence a bucket list. The challenge fascinated me. How do you whittle down America’s longest attraction, a 2,000 mile corridor of fascinating museums, quirky folk art parks, historic sites, renovated motels, ghost towns, dynamic cities, time capsule restaurants and diners, and breathtaking natural attractions into a list of one hundred must see locations? I accepted the challenge and the result is a fun new book scheduled for release on September 1 that is aptly titled, 100 Things to Do on Route 66 Before You Die. (This “Buy Now” button is to purchase an autographed copy of Route 66: America’s Longest Small Town. Stay tuned for

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Good friends, good times, grand adventures, and exciting times

The good folks at the City of Kingman, Josh Noble, the tourism director, Ray Cullison and the Kingsmen, and the volunteers who labored so hard to make the recent Best of the West on 66 Festival a success deserve a hearty thank you.The good folks at the City of Kingman, Josh Noble, the tourism director, Ray Cullison and the Kingsmen, and the volunteers who labored so hard to make the recent Best of the West on 66 Festival a success deserve a hearty thank you.It was a delightful and fun filled event that my dearest friend and I enjoyed immensely. Even better, it was an event that was shared with, and enjoyed by friends from the Netherlands. Though the event evolved from the rather successful 2014

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Two great Route 66 Exhibits in New Mexico – Catch them before they’re gone!

Route 66: Radiance, Rust, and Revival on the Mother Road Until October 2nd at the Albuquerque History Museum and conceived in honor of the 90th anniversary of Route 66, this exhibition celebrates the art, history and popular culture of the iconic Mother Road. Too often the history of Route 66 in Albuquerque has been overlooked, even though our city sits at the center of the Southwestern leg of the route and boasts, at 16 miles, the longest single-city urban stretch of the highway in the nation. We are also the only place on the Mother Road where the highway crosses itself! Indeed the very re-routing of Route 66 to the east-west alignment was a political scandal, but shaved time and miles off the odometers of road-weary

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